Friday, February 25, 2011

VALIS, Pink-Purple Light, Phosphenes & F Sharp

"God, he told us, had fired a beam of pink light directly at him, at his head, his eyes; Fat had been temporarily blinded and his head had ached for days. It was easy, he said, to describe the beam of pink light; it's exactly what you get as a phosphene after-image when a flashbulb has gone off in your face. Fat was spiritually haunted by that color. Sometimes it showed up on a TV screen. He lived for that light, that one particular color." ~VALIS

It was 2009 when I read VALIS, Divine Invasion & The Transmigration of Timothy Archer for the first time, and it triggered a stream of consciousness surrounding the pinkish-purple light spectrum that I will summarize in this blog post.

The key to Philip K. Dick’s VALIS Trilogy was the seeming contrast between the organic and the synthetic (artificial intelligence), the real and the “unreal”.The best illustration of this dynamic was Dick’s encounter with the “pink light”, which he experienced as both an artificial laser and a natural phenomenon of light.The split Philip represented in himself through his altar ego, “Horselover Fat”, not only correlated with the nature of his pink light experiences, but was reflected in his externalization and separation from “God”.

VALIS is the first of a loosely connected trilogy and is a somewhat autobiographical book based upon true events.In early 1974 Dick had a series of experiences that later led to the 1981 science fiction novel VALIS, which stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System (and sounds like another way of saying “matrix”).

I came away from VALIS realizing that if the majority of humans were half as honest with themselves about their personal process and insanity as Philip K. Dick there would certainly be a lot more enlightenment and creative genius going around. Here we are 37 years later and his VALIS/ Zebra/ Plasmate experiences and writings about them are still totally relevant and valuable (and certainly “the empire never ended” still applies). At times Dick's interpretations of the data may have been a bit "off", but it's all there and clearly he was a true visionary who saw a great deal of what has gone on in the past as well as what the future holds (which is why they have made so many movies from his sci fi books).

“The phenomenal world does not exist; it is a hypostasis of the information processed by the Mind.” ~Exigesis #30 from VALIS

Anyone who understands the nature of mind control and MK ultra has to at least suspect Dick was a subject to some extent.The fact that his home was broken into by what were most likely government operatives, along with some of his visions, confirm that he was likely under surveillance to some extent. His encounters with the “pink light” are at the forefront of the mysteries surrounding his life, and it’s a bit disconcerting that he was listening to “Strawberry Fields Forever” when he received one of his main transmissions (a song long associated with mind control). So too is the fact that his pets were not only aware of Dick’s experiences, they died from cancer afterwards.He was also obviously highly disturbed by the visions of the Russian scientists, and it’s best to keep and open mind about all of Dick’s experiences and writings and to remember that the mind controllers aren’t really in control at all.(And as noted in my disclaimer page, they do not own the symbols or the pink light or any of it, but are just spiritually stunted humans in a learning process).

With that said, it’s clear that there is more to his pink light experiences than simple mind control or even a satellite beaming an information rich laser into a person’s head.The very nature of pink light is enough to confirm Philip had a mystical experience of some sort no matter what it was triggered by (and at least one piece of information the pink light gave him saved his son’s life).

“Nothing could generate that color for light but God. In other words, normal light did not contain that color. One time Fat studied a color chart, a chart of the visible spectrum. The color was absent. He had seen a color which no one can see; it lay off the end.” ~VALIS

Not too long ago someone wrote an article about magenta and the fact it does not have its own wavelength called “Magenta Ain’t a Colour”. Many people just didn’t “get” the play on words in the title or the whole point of the article, so the commentary at the bottom is helpful and includes links about how colour is really all in the brain anyway:

I read the VALIS trilogy by the side of a lake during the summer months while it was sunny and warm and the sunlight was brightly reflected upon the water. Violet-pinkish phosphenes from the sunlight filled my eyes and it struck me blind when in the second book, The Divine Invasion, the character states:

"I know that pink,” he said. “It is the human phosphene response to full-spectrum white, to pure sunlight." ~Divine Invasion

Since I was a young child I have been fascinated by the pink-violet tint that the sunlight produces in my eyes when I look at it reflected upon the water for a few seconds. When I used to work in the offices of the “big pink” tower in Portland I would go down to the waterfront on bright days to stare at the sunlit water just to commune with that light.And what’s more I had never really had a fully conscious thought about doing so until reading the VALIS trilogy!

So I looked more deeply into phosphenes and violet-red/ pink light in general. What I found did not surprise me one bit:

Parallel to this universal practice of swaying, there exists another point common to religious rites, initiations and all forms of mystical search: the focusing on sources of light.

For instance, the Zoroastrians use a fire, the Tibetans a flame. The sun or the moon was also worshipped. The reflection of sun on water is used by African mystics; ……

Clairvoyants also use this rudimentary and instinctive practice when they place a candle near a crystal ball. Again, they obtain a phosphene using the reflection of light, the crystal ball acting as a magnifying glass. As all reflected light is more or less polarized, this explains flashes of clairvoyance. It is the same for «magic mirrors » which are absolutely not magical; it is their capacity for reflection that matters. We could quote hundreds of examples that all concur completely, without getting into chancy hypotheses. Studying texts, religions, cults and traditions will show the researcher that phosphenes have greatly contributed to the development of mankind.

What struck me was how I had hardly had a conscious thought about phosphenes nor had I come across much at all in my years of research, though there are many spiritual practices deeply influenced by them.I laughed at how it took VALIS to even get me to think about it, and that phosphenes and afterimages were something I had taken for granted my whole life and hardly noticed the profound role they played in my own clairvoyance.What’s more is that while there are many colors of phosphenes the most prevalent one (at least for me) is that pinkish-violet color described by Dick (secondary is an extreme cobalt bluish).It’s so rarely seen out in nature even in the spring in the city (yet as was pointed out to me there were many violet-purple tones on Pandora in the movie Avatar!).

One thing I recalled was years ago coming across the violet flame back in the days of looking into everything occult and new age.I read bits about how this “special light” is used in meditations, yet I was always turned off by the fact new agers associate this flame with St. Germaine – many of them call it “his flame” (something about St. G. has always stunk in my book, WHO WAS HE REALLY?... but you can make up your own mind about him, I just have an aversion to him perhaps because so many people claim to channel him).So I really didn’t pursue the idea of meditating on a violet flame despite the fact that I literally spent hours looking at the water just to see a violet pink color because something in me subconsciously craved it.

“It has to do with being, he thought to himself, knowing this because, and only because, of the beam of pink light, which was a living, electrical blood, the blood of some immense meta-entity.” ~ The Divine Invasion

“Also notice that the note F# lies even further from violet, in the near-UV (ultra-violet) area of the spectrum. Thus (when raised 39 octaves rather than forty octaves), it also it resides in the far-red (or near infra-red). Because of this, the note F# embraces the visible spectrum, and thus has some red and some violet, a combination that produces more of a purple color.”

I read information online about how the Great Pyramid is tuned to F sharp, and there are many links out there about the possible role of F# in levitating the stones. My own husband had also mentioned the magick of F# as well and how the king's chamber ressonates with it. The pyramid builders clearly understood the power of geometry, sound and light:

What’s more is that I vaguely recalled reading about the story where Crowley claimed to have seen a “lilac” coloured light fill the king’s chamber during the night he spent in the Great Pyramid. When I finally looked up the actual passage in his autobiographical “Confessions” I had a good laugh:

According to many sources ancient texts from the Egyptians to the Chinese claim the earth itself as a planetary sphere is harmonically tuned to F#, and what’s more is that one of the biggest cosmic events in known history involved the note F sharp!

*PS: Think what you will of the SouthPark creators, they know their memes. Check out “Mint Berry Crunch” sealing Cthulhu back into the abyss and flipping off his oppressive older sister (or is it Cartman in gothic drag!?) with PINK LIGHT!*

EDITORIAL NOTE (2015): I changed the title of this from pink-violet to pink-purple for clarity. The pink-violet light I am talking about is the color of the phosphene effect of sunlight. That color is the primary reason I wrote this blog. But the point of the blog really is that pink and purple are outside the prism, so I changed the title to reflect that fact.